Illusions

15

The Pinecrest Lodge was on the northern outskirts of Healdsburg, along a frontage road that paralleled Highway 101 and clearly visible from the freeway. Not large and not small — some sixty units in a pair of two-story wings that extended out from a central lobby, restaurant, and lounge. All the room entrances appeared to face the highway; close behind the complex were stands of trees and a couple of low hills that folded in against each other. On the thirty-foot-tall sign above the entrance drive, the word “Vacancy” burned palely in red neon.

The next exit was a short distance ahead; I took it and came back on the frontage road. This early on a Friday afternoon, only a few cars were parked in the lot. I added mine to the total and entered a lobby that looked and felt and smelled like every motel lobby from California to Maine; the only difference was that they had the heat turned up too high. Nothing at all special about the Pinecrest that I could see. Quite a comedown from the St. Francis for a man like Erskine, but then he hadn’t been interested in comfort or anything else except his ex-wife when he came up here from the city. He’d picked the motel for its location, no other reason. And it would’ve been his last stopping place, I thought, even if he hadn’t died here. He’d been ready to die somewhere in Sonoma County, but not alone: I had little doubt that he would have killed Sondra Nelson and then himself if he’d had the chance.

Behind the desk, a young woman wearing a green blazer with a gold pocket crest of three pines was busy on both the phone and a computer keyboard. She and I were alone in the lobby. I smiled at her; she smiled back, miming the words “I’ll be with you in a moment, sir.” The other party kept her on the line longer than she anticipated, though. She raised her eyebrows and shook her head as if she were mildly exasperated, then smiled at me again. In response I told her silently that it was all right, I was in no hurry. So we had already established a rapport when the conversation finally ended.

“Sorry about that,” she said as if she meant it. “Would you like a room, sir?”

“Well, I’m not sure.” The apologetic note I squeezed into my voice sounded genuine enough. “You do have more than one vacancy?”

“Yes we do. Our rates—”

“Oh, the rate doesn’t matter. What matters is the room.”

“Sir?”

“Not to me, you understand. Any room is fine with me, all I care about is that it has a bed in it. But my wife... well, she’s picky.” I manufactured a sigh. “Very picky.”

The young woman nodded and smiled and said, “Picky in what way?”

“The size of the room, for one thing. Do you have any suites or large rooms with fireplaces?”

“No, I’m sorry, we don’t.”

“So all of your accommodations are the same? I mean, I understand some rooms are singles and some doubles, but the size and general floor plan are identical in each?”

“That’s right. A few do have connecting doors that you can leave open to make up a suite—”

“Not an option, I’m afraid. I wonder... I know this is an imposition, but would it be all right if I looked at one of your ground-floor rooms? My wife insists on the ground floor, and the size and layout really are very important to her.”

“Well...”

“Just a brief look. I’m sure it’ll be suitable, but if it isn’t and I’ve already checked in... I’m being a pest, aren’t I?”

“No, no, not at all. I’d take you out and show you one of the vacancies but I’m here alone right now... Would you mind if I gave you a key and let you go look by yourself?”

“That’s very kind of you. Five minutes or so is all I need.”

“Take as much time as you like, sir.”

We traded smiles again, and I went on my way with a key. Simple as that. I hoped the next person who took advantage of the nice young woman’s trust had motives as relatively benign as mine.

The number on the key was 116, a room more or less in the middle of the south wing. Average-size rectangle, only slightly deeper than it was wide, with a half wall separating the bed and sitting area from a bathroom cubicle and an adjoining space containing a countertop with two sinks, a mirror, and an open closet. Double bed, round table and two uncomfortable cane-backed chairs, dresser, writing desk, TV set on a stand. Blue-and-green decor, blue-and-green seascapes that nobody in his right mind would want to steal screwed tight to the walls. If the room were to survive intact into the twenty-second century, anthropologists of that time could stick it into a museum as a perfect example of Standard American Motel Room, Late Twentieth Century.

I stepped inside, leaving the door partway open, and took a long look at it, the jamb, and the locking mechanisms. The knob lock was a deadbolt and so was the security lock above it. There was also a chain fastener of the sort that makes some people feel safe in strange surroundings, as well as in their own home, but that in reality provides little protection; a hefty twelve-year-old can kick or shoulder through ninety-eight percent of them. The deadbolts were of decent manufacture and durable enough, and the door here fit snugly in the jamb, which indicated that the same would be true in the other units. Battle had told me both deadbolts had been set in Erskine’s room; the chain lock must’ve been off for the cleaning woman to passkey her way in. There were methods an expert locksmith could use to gimmick a couple of dead-bolts like these, but the average person working without foreknowledge and the proper tools couldn’t hope to manage it. Besides, the cleaning woman and the two guests had been close enough to hear the shots and to get out to where they could see Erskine’s door in a hurry. There would not have been time for anyone in the room to either gimmick the locks or get out through the door unseen.

The same went for the curtained window next to it. Two overlapping halves, one of which you could slide open to let in air; that half was screened. The latch was a simple snap type, but the sliding half was fitted with one of those security bolts that you can screw down to prevent the window from opening even when the latch is released. Forget this window as an exit, too.

That left the bathroom. It wasn’t much larger than an upended packing crate, with just enough space for a toilet and a compact tub and shower; put three people in it and you’d be inviting an orgy. The only window in there was above the tub — an oblong, overlapping-halves job similar to the one out front, except that it was much smaller and the glass was opaque and unscreened. Three feet long, not much more than eighteen inches high. I swung over into the tub, leaned up to look more closely at the window. Same kind of snap catch as the other but without the screw-down bolt. I slid the one half open. No outside screen or bars. I stuck my head through the opening. Trees, hillsides, not much else to see.

Somebody could have gotten out this way without being seen, all right, but it would’ve had to have been a slender and agile somebody to squeeze through such a small opening. I couldn’t have done it if my life depended on it. Gail Kendall couldn’t have, and I doubted Woolfox would’ve fit, either. Sondra Nelson... maybe. But she was the one with the tightest alibi of all: jury duty fifteen miles away.

I took a couple more passes through the room, looking at each of its contents, trying to figure an angle. Suppose the shot the maid and guests heard wasn’t the one that had killed Erskine? Some sort of second-shot delay gimmick, like putting a long, slow fuse on a stick of dynamite. Firecrackers, air-filled and then popped paper bags, a shot recorded on tape and played back later... I’d heard of or personally encountered all of those little tricks. The problem with something like that, though, was that the perp either had to be on the premises, which in this case wasn’t feasible, or there had to be some leftover evidence to reveal the gaffe. Battle would’ve mentioned having found the remains of a blown firecracker or anything else that obviously didn’t belong, and if there’d been a recording device he’d have replayed its tape; trained investigators don’t miss things like that. And there was nothing in the room or its furnishings that suggested any cute possibilities. Scratch the second-shot delay theory.

What else? Some other type of misdirection? I couldn’t imagine any that fit the circumstances as Battle had outlined them to me. If Erskine had been murdered, even with malice aforethought, it had to’ve been a simple, straightforward crime. Not enough time to plan anything elaborate or even clever; and homicides involving overheated passions don’t generate fancy schemes anyway. Any trickery would’ve been improvised on the spot, to take advantage of the situation as it developed, and in this case it didn’t seem likely or even possible. Scratch trickery of any kind. What you saw was all there was. So if it had been murder, the perp had gone out through that tiny bathroom window. Or managed to hide behind the door and then slip out after the cleaning woman and male guest came in — an even more unlikely prospect.

I left the room, locked the door behind me. As I started to turn back toward the lobby, I spied a maid’s cart down at the end of the wing. Sight of it prodded me into a switch of direction. When I neared the cart, a middle-aged woman in uniform came out through the open door of room 130 with an armload of dirty linen. She looked to be Latina, and tired and beaten down by her daily grind. She gave me an indifferent look that didn’t change much when I said, “Excuse me. I’d like to talk to you, please.”

“Yes?”

“About what happened here last week. The shooting.”

She rolled her eyes upward. Muttered to herself, “Ai, Dios mio. Un otro agente inquiridor con otro interrogatión. Cada vez más.”

“No tender nada un secreto, eh, señora?”

“...Habla Español,” she said, surprised.

“Si, un poquito.” She thought I was a cop, a mistake a lot of people make: I have the look and I walk the walk. I let her think it. You can’t be accused of impersonating an agente inquiridor unless you make the claim yourself; other people’s perceptions don’t count. In English I asked, “Are you the woman who found the dead man?”

“No, that was Carmelita.”

“Is she here now?”

“Sí. Upstairs.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d take me to her.”

“Como quieras,” she said and sighed, and led me up the nearest staircase to the second floor.

Carmelita was vacuuming one of the rooms back toward the front; she shut the machine off when we walked in. She was younger and thinner than my escort, but hard work and hard living had already carved the same deep lines of weariness in her brown face. Looking at the two of them put me in mind of the volatile rhetoric of too many compassionless politicians and their minions these days. Yes, sir, all those south-of-the-border immigrants, legals and illegals both, sure do have an easy time of it here in the land of plenty, stealing jobs and living the good life. Just ask them. Just spend five minutes looking at the world through their eyes.

The older woman spoke to the younger one in rapid Spanish, too fast and idiomatic for me to follow. Carmelita looked nervous and a little frightened. One kind of cynic might have said it was because she didn’t have a green card and wanted nothing to do with authority in any form; my kind of cynic thought it was probably an ingrained fear born of poverty, oppression, and racial hatred.

Carmelita admitted in broken English that she had found “the dead one” — she crossed herself as she spoke the words — but had told the other policía all about it, she didn’t know anything more, she was only a mujer de la limpieza, a cleaning woman. I asked her in Spanish to tell it one more time, por favor, but the politeness didn’t do much to put her at ease. She rattled off her story, not making eye contact, getting it all out in a rush as if she were purging herself of a virulent form of bile.

Erskine had had the end room on the ground floor, north wing; she’d been two rooms away, waiting for “the Mr. and Mrs. Doyle” to move their luggage out so she could clean. All three had heard the report at seven-forty. She knew the time because Mr. Doyle had looked at his watch and later she’d heard him tell the police. Mrs. Doyle said the noise sounded like a gunshot; Mr. Doyle said it was a gunshot and ran to Erskine’s room and listened at the door and then pounded on it. When no one answered, he told Carmelita she had better use her passkey, somebody might be hurt inside. She hadn’t wanted to do that, it was against motel rules, but when he insisted she gave in. She and Mr. Doyle both went inside. “I wan to scream when I see the dead one,” she said, and crossed herself again, “but I can’t make a sound.” Mr. Doyle took her arm, led her outside, told her to stay there with his wife while he went to the lobby to call the police. And that was all that had happened, all she knew.

I said, “Just a few questions, Carmelita. Si usted no dene inconveniente. How long was it from the time you heard the shot to the time you unlocked the door?”

“I doan know for sure. Quatro, cinco minutos.”

Enough time for somebody to wiggle out through that narrow bathroom window; more than enough time. “When Mr. Doyle listened at the door, did he say if he heard anything inside?”

“No, he doan say.”

“Did he act as if he had?”

Headshake.

“When you were inside the room, did you or Mr. Doyle go to look in the bathroom?”

“The bathroom? No, señor. We go out again, quick.”

“How quick? Un minuto? Dos?”

“No! Diez segundo, cuando más.”

Ten seconds at the most. “Did you or Mr. Doyle touch anything in the room?”

“No. I wan to pick up the pitillo but he doan let me.”

“What cigarette, Carmelita?”

“On the carpet. Mr. Doyle say doan touch nothing so the carpet, it gets burn.”

“Where was it burning the carpet?”

“Where?” She shook her head, not understanding.

“Close to the dead man or not?”

“Close.” Carmelita shivered. “Almost burn him, his hand.”

“As if he’d dropped it when he fell.”

“Sí.”

“And where was he lying, exactly?”

“Near the bed.”

“Closer to the bed than the table?”

“Si.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“The bed, sí.”

“Where was the chair he’d been sitting in?”

“Como?”

“Was it on the floor too, knocked over?”

“No. At the table. Both chairs.”

“Close to the table, you mean?”

“Sí, close.”

“The things he was using to clean his gun — rags, oil, things like that. Were some of them on the floor?”

“I doan think so.”

“All still on the table?”

“Sí.”

“Knocked over, scattered around?”

Blank look, another headshake; she said something in Spanish to the older woman, who shrugged and remained silent. The older one didn’t want any part of this interrogation.

I said patiently to Carmelita, “When you bump into a table, the things that are on it sometimes fall over, even if they don’t roll off onto the floor. Comprende?”

“Sí.”

“Is that the way the things on the table looked?”

“No, señor. Everything... you know, not fall over.”

Battle hadn’t mentioned the burning cigarette to me; or the positioning of the chairs and the body; or the fact that the cleaning supplies were still in order on the table. Maybe he hadn’t seen anything suspicious in any of that or all of it combined. But I did. Why would anyone clean a handgun with a lighted cigarette in his hand or mouth? Cleaning fluid is flammable, for one thing. And you need clear eyes and both hands free throughout the process to do a proper job. It wasn’t inconceivable that a distracted, obsessive man would make the mistake of lighting up; in fact, it could’ve been the cigarette that led to an accidental firing of the weapon — smoke getting in his eyes, hot ash dropping on his hand, that kind of thing. Still, it didn’t feel right to me. None of it did. If he’d been sitting at or close to the table when the gun went off, the impact of the bullet would have kicked both him and the chair backward, toppled both to the floor. Chances were he’d have also whacked the table in reflex, sent some or all of the supplies toppling over and off. The fact that none of that had happened said to me he’d either been standing when the slug hit him, or he’d been perched on the edge of the bed — and it didn’t make much sense that a man would stand up to clean a weapon, or sit to do the job five feet from where the supplies were...

The two women were watching me, Carmelita fidgeting and the older one in a kind of rigid, waiting-to-be-activated posture not unlike the vacuum cleaner. I smiled at them and said, “That’s all, you can go back to work now,” and plucked a pair of sawbucks out of my wallet and handed one to each woman. “Mil gracias.”

They looked at the money, at me, at each other. Their expressions were mirror images — an openmouthed mixture of incredulity and awe. An Anglo policeman who spoke Spanish, even if it was of the schoolbook variety, and handed out ten-dollar bills for no apparent reason? In their world, the not-so-brave new world of Los Estados Unidos, it was as much a miracle as any they were ever likely to encounter.